Women in Germany have had the right to vote for 105 years, they have been allowed to open their own bank accounts for 40 years, rape in marriage has been prohibited for 26 years and four years ago the principle “No means no” against sexual harassment was included in the penal code recorded. Progress? no What sounds progressive is actually a veritable small denominator in a centuries-long struggle. March 8th marks the anniversary of International Women’s Day, or rather Feminist Day of Struggle – and women all over the world still have to fight for their equality and recognition. Gender pay gap, female poverty in old age as well as sexual harassment and abuse are still part of everyday life for most women. And that in 2023! However, instead of giving in to anger and frustration, the author of this text would like to use the month of the month to call attention to all the pioneering women who changed the world – and yet often do not appear in history books. Welcome to the ME section “Women who have changed the world with their art”.
Portrait: Hedy Lamarr – Hollywood star, sex symbol, misjudged genius
Hedy Lamarr, one of the most underrated women in film history, once said, “Any girl can be glamorous. You just have to stand still and look stupid.” She has had more than enough personal experience with it. Lamarr was considered the “most beautiful woman in the world” in the 1930s and 1940s, provided the first nude scene in a feature film of all time, became a Hollywood star – and invented a secret communication technique during World War II, for which she was known because of her However, beauty has not been taken seriously for a long time. She only received recognition for this shortly before her death, and she never earned a cent from it. Hedy Lamarr’s invention – the so-called frequency hopping method – is responsible for numerous mobile radio technologies that we now call WiFi, Bluetooth and GPS.
Hedy Lamarr was born Hedwig Eva Maria Kiesler on November 9, 1914 in Vienna. She is the daughter of a bank director and a concert pianist, who attach great importance to their child’s artistic education. As a young girl, Kiesler was allowed to attend a Swiss private school and received piano, ballet and language lessons. She dropped out of school at the age of 16 in order to concentrate fully on her acting career and initially worked as a “script girl” at the Sascha film studios in Vienna before she was cast in 1930 for a small role in the film “Das Geld on the street” is cast. After that, everything happened very quickly: in her fourth film, “Man Needs No Money” (1931), she was able to get a leading role alongside acting stars Heinz Rühmann and Hans Moser.
A scandal turns her into a star overnight
In 1933, Hedy Kiesler took on the leading female role in Gustav Machatý’s Czechoslovak feature film “Ekstasy”. The actress, who was only 18 at the time, appears completely naked in one scene in the love drama, and in another sequence she mimics an orgasm. The scandal that followed is gigantic, even the Pope gets involved. However, the fact that the film was only shown in a shortened form and was repeatedly censored no longer affects Hedy Kiesler – the up-and-coming actress has become a star overnight. In the same year she married the arms mogul Fritz Mandl, who, among other things, had dealings with fascist greats such as Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini. The tyrannical and notoriously jealous industrialist bans his wife from acting and buys countless copies of Ecstasy to nip her career in the bud. In 1937, after four years of marriage, Hedy Keisler managed to break away from her domineering husband and emigrated to the United States to return to acting.
In Hollywood, Hedy Keisler is personally taken under the wing of “MGM” boss Louis B. Mayer, who gives her the stage name Hedy Lamarr – inspired by the silent film star Barbara La Marr – and calls her the “most beautiful woman in the world”. And his marketing concept works: within a very short time, Hedy Lamarr developed into one of the most successful Hollywood icons of the 1930s and 1940s; She starred opposite Clark Gable in The Daredevil (1940), directed the romance Come, Stay With Me (1941) with James Stewart, and co-directed The Spotlight (1941) with Lana Turner and Judy Garland the camera. However, her greatest success is the drama “Samson and Delilah” (1949), which was nominated for five Oscars and a Golden Globe Award. With her short curly black hair, small nose and thinly plucked eyebrows, Lamarr became a style icon and sex symbol of her time – both the cartoon character Catwoman and Disney’s first screen heroine Snow White are said to have been inspired by the actress.
“She didn’t want to just sit there and make a lot of money when the world is in this state”
Up to this point, the life story of Hedy Lamarr reads like a classic fairy tale; a meteoric rise, a tyrannical husband, emancipation that followed, a singular career. happy end. However, it is not quite like that. In fact, there is another, far darker chapter in Lamarr’s life. This begins during World War II, when the actress is just at the peak of her career. As a staunch opponent of National Socialism, she spent hours discussing ideas with the eccentric film composer George Antheil about how they could support the Allies in the war. “She didn’t want to just sit there and make a lot of money when the world was in this state,” George Antheil later recalled. So they start to develop a radio remote control for torpedoes. To do this, Lamarr and Antheil use punch cards, which are actually used to control automatic pianos. In June 1941, the two applied for a patent for their invention, and in August 1942 they were granted a patent number.
Lamarr and Antheil describe the technical concept behind the radio remote control for torpedoes as “frequency hopping”: It describes the possibility that both the radio beacon and the receiver in the torpedo can jump from frequency to frequency at the same time, which means that it making it impossible for the enemy to locate the radio link. With the development of frequency hopping, Lamarr and Antheil unwittingly laid the foundation for many telecommunications inventions to come, including Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, GPS, and smartphones. But despite the incredible explosive power of their invention, the US Navy is unimpressed when the two present their invention to them. Although Hedy Lamarr and George Antheil developed the radio remote control explicitly for use in World War II, the two are rejected. The reason: You would “unfortunately not get a piano in the torpedoes,” scoffs the military. Lamarr should leave it at acting.
“I was the highest paid and most important star in Hollywood, but I was considered ‘difficult'”
So it is that the patent on Lamarr and Antheil’s invention expires without ever having been used. The composer dies in 1959; he will no longer notice the effects of his work. Radio remote control only found military use during the Cuban Missile Crisis in the 1960s, when a “sono buoy” was developed to better detect submarines. In the early 1980s, the technology is released to the public and cellular technology takes advantage of the concept. At this point, George Antheil is long dead and Lamarr’s Hollywood career is long over. After the Austrian actress was unable to benefit from her invention, the good role offers are also increasingly long in coming due to her advancing age. Hollywood seems to be more interested in her beautiful body than her acting talent. Instead, several sets are said to be “difficult” and exhausting to work with. Hedy Lamarr himself later laconically said: “I was the highest paid and most important star in Hollywood, but I was considered ‘difficult’.”
In 1958 she shoots her last film. When her autobiography “Ecstasy and Me” was published almost ten years later, Hedy Lamarr sued the ghostwriter. Her accusation: He twisted the facts. In the book, she resembles “a projection screen for male sexual fantasies,” according to one review. For the last decades until her death in 2000, Hedy Lamarr lived a lonely and withdrawn life in Florida. She was married six times, had three children and a few affairs with women, which are only brought to the surface for the sake of sensationalism. Three years before her death, Hedy Lamarr received the Electronic Frontier Foundation Pioneer Award. The Austrian inventor prize followed a year later. In 2014, she was posthumously inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame. For several years now, on November 9th (Lamarr’s birthday), the “Day of the Inventors” has been celebrated in German-speaking countries. When the 82-year-old found out about the Pioneer Award in 1997, she is said to have said via voice recording: “Thank you. I hope you’re feeling as good as I am and it hasn’t been in vain.”
This text first appeared on musikexpress.de on March 8, 2021 and has now been updated.
More highlights
<!–
–>
<!–
–>